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报告摘要

What determines whether Official Development Assistance (ODA) can reduce casualties intrastate conflicts? In her newly published master’s thesis, HCSS Data Scientist Emma Bokel examines 156 countries between 1989 and 2022 using Dynamic Panel GMM and a Causal Forest model to assess both average effects and underlying heterogeneity. The study finds that ODA does not reliably reduce conflict deaths on average, with a persistent “conflict trap” driven by prior-year fatalities. Instead, effectiveness depends on four key conditions: political stability, aid fragmentation, delivery channel, and purpose-specific aid dynamics, leading to policy recommendations emphasing context-sensitive allocation, multilateral delivery in fragile settings, and prevention over de-escalation.